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book review: the dark tower (complete series)

Last July I began reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I finished it last week. I’m glad I read it but there were definitely aspects I liked more than others.

I came to the series through Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes From a Multiverse‘s Gunshooter strips and the upcoming movie. I like to know about these big event pieces of fiction that people will talk about even if I haven’t been to a movie theatre since Fury Road (no wait, I saw The Force Awakens in the theatre). In this case I wanted to get a bit of my own opinionating underway before the flood of other people’s thoughts overwhelm me. Casting Idris Elba as the gunslinger pissed off racists (Rosenberg’s second wave of Gunshooter strips reflected this casting) so that’s cool, but I wanted to have more of a reason to care about this story, and that meant reading it.

There are seven books in the series and they range unevenly between post-apocalyptic western and alternate-universe-hopping Sliders knockoff and self-indulgent hamhanded metafictional pastiche. I liked it best when it was doing the western thing (The Gunslinger (Gunshooter interpretation), the middle 3/4 of Wizard and Glass and the non-priest-focused parts of Wolves of the Calla), and the ending was pretty great. I hated the Doombots and the Harry Potter references and the “Stephen King: maintainer of the universe” bullshit. The way things were kludged together in terms of timelines and reinventing how timetravel worked with a handwave about a keystone world annoyed me, as did most of the dialogue.

But. I’m glad I read it. I like it as a frame for reading the rest of Stephen King’s work through. It felt supremely self-indulgent but that’s what you trust an author with, right? If it had ended worse I’d have been pissed off, but it ends well (deus ex machina note from Stephen King aside).